FLIR One thermal camera: The iPhone case of my dreams

For years now the gadget at the top of my wishlist has been a thermal imaging camera, specifically one from FLIR. In my opinion a thermal camera is something that’s just too awesome to not own, and I do enough work with heat producing products (CPUs, LED bulbs, etc.) that it would almost make sense to own one if they were cheap enough. Unfortunately thermal cams are anything but affordable and because they are professional equipment, they tend to hold their value well, so even a used unit was not an option.

So when FLIR announced a thermal imaging iPhone case last year I was immediately interested. With the iPhone doing the heavy lifting I assumed the case would be relatively affordable and then extremely easy to use, as it was powered by iOS. It turns out that I had to wait over a year to get my hands on the case, but it’s easy to use and it’s reasonably affordable at $349.

The FLIR One thermal imaging iPhone 5/5S case is available now, and it’s quite awesome. The case won an Editors’ Choice award from PCMag (given by Geek.com contributor Will Greenwald) because of its affordability and ease of use.

Of course, I had to grab the FLIR One and experiment. Here’s some of what you can do:

Or this:

Or you can take pictures like the ones in the gallery at the top of this post. Or this one of a cool dude holding his iced coffee:

The FLIR One case is not without its faults, though. First of all, while $350 is a great price for a thermal cam, it’s far from the impulse purchase range. The 80 x 60 thermal resolution is reasonable for the price — it’s what you’d find in a $1,000 dedicated thermal camera — but it’s still not very much. When translated into images, you are looking at something in the VGA range (528 x 396 to be exact), which is comically small compared to images taken by today’s digital cameras.

The FLIR One has multiple modes, like contrast, and rainbow, and iron, but don’t let that fool you because they all do the same thing, except with different coloring on screen. What’s infinitely more annoy then the now-standard filters is that every picture has a watermark embedded on the top right, so everyone knows you took it with a FLIR. You can’t turn this off in the settings, it’s just something you have to deal — despite the fact that you paid full price for this unit you have a watermark embedded in it as if you were using freeware. All your shooting must be done in the FLIR apps, so forget about Camera+ or Pro HDR.

Also, if it wasn’t abundantly clear yet, the case doesn’t work on its own, you need an iPhone 5 or 5S in there. The FLIR One has its own thermal camera and battery — it even has a micro USB port for charging — but when you snap a shot the software combines the phone’s image with the thermal cam’s 60 x 40 one in a process that’s called multi-spectral dynamic imaging (MSX). This is how you go from a postage stamp-sized 60 x 40 image to 528 x 396.

Is the case useful though? That’s a tougher call, but the point is that it works, so if you have need of a thermal camera then you should find it very useful. FLIR is aiming it mainly at people doing home repair, say looking for drafts that are cooling off your home in the winter. I thought it would be much more useful for inspecting the thermals on a new computer build. The case itself holds a thermal camera, a shutter system, and a battery, which means its bulk enough that you won’t want to keep it on your phone all the time. Realizing this, FLIR make it a two-part system, where there is an slim plastic case on the phone from which can be removed the bulky part housing the battery. The slim case is your standard plastic case with a soft-touch matte finish for grip.

Regardless of its utility — that’s up to the user after all — my dream of owning a thermal camera is finally within reach. And the images I take will be on my phone, not stored away on a bulky yellow handheld that looks like it was a rejected from the set of a sci-fi movie.